The Wind Cannot Read

Did I say I was running out of material with 'The Mind Benders'?

Scratch that.

'The Mind Benders' is freakin' 'Rashomon' compared to 'The Wind Cannot Read'.

Directed by - it's that man again! - Ralph Thomas from a novel by Richard Mason, 'The Wind Cannot Read' is the kind of they-don't-make-'em-like-that-anymore melodrama that perfectly demonstrates why they don't make 'em like that anymore.

The title is from a Japanese poem which states:



A decent metaphor for a narrative about transience, uncertainty and those twists of fate which blow us off course and against which it is as futile to struggle as a rose petal against the wind.

And if you think my emphasis of the title is heavy-handed, wait till you see how Thomas gets stuck into it. He structures the opening sequence - which, to be fair, contains some effectively grim imagery of emasculated survivors, the bones of the not-so-lucky and the dark shapes of the vultures who have picked them clean - around the retreat from Burma, RAF pilot Michael Quinn (Dirk Bogarde) and two of his fellow airmen almost at death's door by the time they make it to safety. They stumble upon a beautifully cultivated garden with - yep - a sign urging them not to pick the flowers. Thomas slaps the poem over this image, then follows it up with the title in letters so big and garish they fill the entire screen.

Later, just for good measure, he includes some husky-voiced crooner singing "the wind cannot read" at the exact moment that Quinn first lays eyes on Sabby (Yoko Tani). Our boy's been sent to India by this time, studying Japanese while he recuperates so that he can be useful in an intelligence role. It's here that he crosses swords with up-his-own-arse officer type Fenwick (Ronald Lewis). Predictably, Sabby just happens to be the class's new instructor. Equally predictably, it's Fenwick who discovers Quinn and Sabby's taboo-busting, definitely-against-regulations cross-cultural romance.



The ensuing complications are interrupted when Quinn gets orders to return to Burma. It gets even more melodramatic than that, but on the slim chance you're keen on seeing 'The Wind Cannot Read' (word of advice: have a book to hand; maybe some knitting), I won't spoil it for you. Just don't say the title didn't tell you so when it finally lumbers to an end. Oh, and look out for a young Donald Pleasance in the last sequence.

Quinn and Sabby's romance - progressing from tentative courtship to marriage - occupies two thirds of the film and is played out against a tourist board vision of India where everybody wears bright colours and mostly ride on elephants, the beggars are clean and Thomas shoots the Taj Mahal from every conceivable angle during a pointless scene that seems to have been concocted purely to accommodate this barrage of National Geographical style shots.

Actually, a back copy of National Geographical would probably hold more interest than 'The Wind Cannot Read' - you'd at least learn something about the countries visited and there's always the off-chance of some bare-breasted tribeswomen.

But I digress.

What makes it worse is that 'The Wind Cannot Read' could have been, Mason's tortuous narrative notwithstanding, an interesting project.

David Lean began pre-production on 'The Wind Cannot Read', under the auspices of producer Alexander Korda. He wrote a screenplay in colloboration with Richard Mason and began scouting locations. When Lean discovered 22-year-old Japanese actress Kishi Keiko, he was convinced she was perfect for Sabby. Determining to capture the real India on film - as well as telling a passionate and poignant love story - Lean's enthusiasm was running high. Then came a series of conflicts with Korda - over the script, over casting - which remained unresolved when Korda died in early 1956. By this point, Lean was already in talks with Sam Spiegel for 'The Bridge on the River Kwai'. Everything fell through and the property passed to the Rank Organisation; Lean turned his attention to 'Bridge'; and Keiko - who had been brought over to Britain in a storm of publicity and talked up as the next big thing - was robbed of a potential breakthrough role for western audiences and returned home.

When the project passed to them, Thomas and his partner/producer Betty E Box worked from Lean's script (although the credits suggest Mason wrote the script single-handedly) as well as using some of the locations Lean had already scouted. But Ralph Thomas was no David Lean (his pedestrian direction sucks the life out of scene after scene) and it's impossible to watch 'The Wind Cannot Read' without a frustrating curiosity nagging away at you as to what might have been.

Although Lean would certainly not have cast Bogarde (Kenneth More was his preferred choice), it's certainly down to Bogarde's popularity that 'The Wind Cannot Read' was a box office hit. In his magnificent biography of David Lean, Kevin Brownlow records that the director's response, when he saw the eventual film, was to ask Thomas for a share of the profits.

The Mind Benders

It is Dirk Bogarde's collaborations with Joseph Losey (five films) and Luchino Visconti (two films) that are made the most of by the critics. But what of his four-film association with Basil Dearden? It was under Dearden's direction that the world got its first glimpse of the dark side of Dirk - as Tom Riley in 'The Blue Lamp'. They did their finest work together with 'Victim' - an incredibly brave, taboo-busting film which helped change public perception and attitudes towards gay men. For these two films alone, Bogarde and Dearden can be forgiven a couple of misfires: 'The Gentle Gunman', more John Mills's show than Bogarde's and a film that leaves a nasty taste with me in its confused quasi-sympathies with its IRA protagonists; and the production under consideration today, 'The Mind Benders'.

It's a curate's egg of a film, starting out with a tense bit of scientist-on-the-run business which recalls the Boulting Brothers' 'Seven Days to Noon', then edging into scientific/behavioural paranoia territory that would be exploited far more effectively in the later '60s and in the '70s ('The Mind Benders' was made in 1963) in everything from 'The Manchurian Candidate' to 'The Parallax View'. Both of these are about brainwashing. 'The Mind Benders' treads a similar path, but is more concerned with the mind's susceptibility and how isolation experiments change the subject: their behaviour, their personality, the likelihood of their responding to influences which would normally be alien to them.

All the ingredients for ... well, whatever you want to make of them. Tense thriller. Social satire. Just-round-the-corner speculative sci-fi. Dearden and writer James Kennaway could have gone anywhere with the material. In the hands of a bizarro visionary like Dario Argento (okay, I know he'd barely started out in cinema by then; indulge me), there would be scope to go crazy with the material. Hell, even Ken Russell would have turned it into a subversive symphony of brain-boggling visuals. Dearden arranges slab-like utilitarian Sixties architecture into some decent compositions and conjures a moodily effective image of hero-by-default Professor Longman (Bogarde) as his personality begins to change, but for much of its scant 95-minute running time 'The Mind Benders' is crushingly ordinary.

So why select it for the Dirk-fest? Truth is, I ran a little short of material this time round. There is so much of Bogarde's filmography still unavailable on DVD. 'Providence' is floating around on the personal faves list and I'm tempted to write about it from memory (even though it's a good fifteen years since I've seen it) but the ever-hopeful part of me opts to bide its time until that belated DVD release occurs. Quite a few of the titles that are available, I don't want to write about - films that Bogarde owed his matinee idol status to (the 'Doctor' films, for example) but are actually pretty lame. I notched up seven films apiece on the First and Second Annual Dirk-Fests, and between what's in the collection and what the Lovefilm queue has come up with I've only just made it to seven this year.

(I'm already thinking that next year's Dirk-fest might of necessity focus on Dirk Bogarde the writer, principally his autobiographical works.)

Also, 'The Mind Benders' is not entirely without merit. The isolation experiment Longman undergoes, robbed of all sensory stimuli as he floats underwater, is effectively realised, particularly when Longman realises the movement of his hand through the water can restore one of the senses - touch - to him; the eroticism with which his mind seizes on this is demonstrated by a simple but effective overlay:

The cast is strong: a host of British cinema stalwarts (some at the very start of their careers) turn in sterling work - John Clements, Michael Bryant, Wendy Craig, Terence Alexander, Edward Fox, Geoffrey Keen and an excellent, often underrated Mary Ure. Bogarde, needless to say, is peerless. A scene where he is confronted with his own culpability in an experiment that mentally scarred a colleague sees him swing between defiance and doubt, bitterness and regret. Bogarde doesn't miss a beat in his multi-faceted characterisation. He gives the material a credibility it probably doesn't deserve.

Hot Enough for June

Nore - in Godalming, Surrey - was the last and most extravagant of the country houses Dirk Bogarde owned in England before he upped sticks for France and settled in a Provence farmhouse. Set in ten acres, it was more of an estate, with two cottages and a studio in addition to the house itself, which boasted ten bedrooms and eight bathrooms. Bogarde and his manager/partner Tony Forwood paid £40,000 for it. That was in 1962. When it went on the market in 2004, the asking price was £2.5million.

Imagine the upkeep! It's no coincidence, as John Coldstream points out in his magnificent biography of Bogarde, that he began "accepting parts purely for the money". Even then, he wasn't enamoured about appearing in 'Hot Enough for June', Ralph Thomas's adaptation of Lionel Davidson's novel 'The Night of Wenceslas'. It was only when Tom Courtenay was in the frame for Nicholas Whistler, the hapless linguist who becomes a spy without even knowing it, that Forwood, as Coldstream recounts in the biography "said to Dirk in front of the producer and director: 'I'm not sure, Dirk, that you can afford to turn this down. Everyone knew that 'afford' was meant in the literal sense."

It wouldn't be the last time Bogarde gritted his teeth and made a film he had no interest in - nor the last time he'd do it to fund the upkeep on a house. In the 70s, he again returned to the espionage genre (with 'The Serpent' and 'Permission to Kill') and sunk the paycheques into Clermont, his property in France. I've not seen either of these, although both have eclectic casts and sound like they might be highly entertaining films. I have seen 'Hot Enough for June', though, and while it's not the abject mess that many critics would have you believe neither is it (unfortunately) a camp, spoofy underrated gem ripe for rediscovery.


That it never really gels is because it isn't camp or spoofy enough.

The plot in a nutshell: aspiring writer Nicholas Whistler (Bogarde) is happily signing on at the Labour Exchange when he's given an interview, ostensibly for a trainee management position. Picked for an overseas assignment due to his fluency in Czech, he has no idea that his new boss, Cunliffe (Robert Morley) is actually a big wheel in MI5, or that he's an unknowing courier, there to collect a formula and carry it back to London. Arriving in Prague, he is assigned a chauffeur: the glamorous Vlasta (Sylva Koscina). He has just as little idea that Vlasta's father, Simoneva (Leo McKern) is a ranking member of the Secret Police and Cunliffe's opposite number. Simoneva wants Whistler for his contact and the formula. Vlasta just plain wants him. Hilarious shenanigans ensue.

Or should have ensued. The opening scene, even before Whistler is recruited, sets the scene for the film 'Hot Enough for June' could have been. In a non-descript office, spymaster Roger Allsop (John le Mesurier) returns to the quartermaster a plethora of gadgets, ruing the untimely demise of the agent to whom they'd been issued. A cut to an index card reading "007 - deceased" provides the punchline. Although the number is never mentioned, it's clear Whistler has been recruited as 008. Only without anyone actually bothering to tell him.

At this point (ie. three minutes in), Ralph Thomas and scripter Lukas Heller - best known perhaps as co-writer, with Nunnally Johnson, of 'The Dirty Dozen' - could have gone one of two ways: absurdist humour played dead straight (a la 'Dr Strangelove'), or out-and-out camp spoofery. Sadly, 'Hot Enough for June' is neither one thing nor the other, and such pleasure as it does offer are incidental ones. Such as Morley and McKern chewing up the scenery, the latter bringing a brusque physicality and a droll wit to his characterisation of Simoneva.

There are wry touches - although much more humour could have been milked from them - in a smattering of scenes which point up the differences between Whistler and his better-known predecessor: when Whistler dons a tux it's not to make a dashing entrance into an opulent casino but to impersonate a head waiter as he makes his escape through a restaurant (he tarries long enough to serve up a Hungarian goulash with dumplings; when Whistler needs a mode of transport to get away from his pursuers it's not an Aston Martin DB5 with modifications but a stolen push bike.

Bogarde bumbles through the (deliberately) half-arsed action scenes like a good sport, maintaining an air of perplexion throughout. The man was no stranger to light comedy at this stage in his career, as his almost unholy popularity as Simon Sparrow in the 'Doctor' films attests. He even invests his scenes with Sylva Koscina with a bit of sparkle.

But, ah Sylva Koscina! If there is any reason to watch 'Hot Enough for June', it's Sylva Koscina. Playing Vlasta as an ice-maiden one moment and a purring, coquettish kitten the next - and with a twinkle in her eye that lets you know the whole thing's one big joke - she sways and shimmies through the film with a knockout 60s hairdo, an hourglass figure and a disarming amount of likeability.

Never really achieving the Hollywood cross-over success of Sophia Loren, Koscina propped up any number of forgotten thrillers and sex comedies in the '60s and '70s. Coincidentally, her motivation for accepting roles was not dissimilar to Bogarde's: most of the money went into her well-appointed villa in Rome's affluent Marino district.

Campbell's Kingdom

Ah, the great and prolific actor/director relationships: John Wayne and John Ford, Robert de Niro and Martin Scorsese, Johnny Depp and Tim Burton, Dirk Bogarde and Basil Dearden Joseph Losey Ralph Thomas.

Bollocks!

It pains me to discuss the Bogarde/Thomas relationship (nine films together compared to the five he made with Losey and the four with Dearden) since Thomas was a journeyman director and did little to tap into either the brooding sensuality or the tortured intensity of Bogarde as an actor. Nevertheless, it was the likes of the 'Doctor' films ('~ in the House', '~at Sea', '~ at Large', '~in Distress'*) which made him a matinee idol. His dreamy turns in 'A Tale of Two Cities' and 'The Wind Cannot Read' went over big with his legions of fans, as well. 'Hot Enough for June' - considered elsewhere in this year's Dirk-fest - didn't quite recapture the mainstream magic, while their final collaboration, 'The High Bright Sun', is largely forgotten.

Which leaves 'Campbell's Kingdom' - certainly my favourite of a frankly not-that-remarkable canon. Adapted from Hammond Innes's bestseller, it opens with Bruce Campbell** (Bogarde) turning up at ramshackle Canadian mining town Come Lucky having inherited his late grandfather's land, a tract the old man was convinced was rich in oil. Old man Campbell's undoing was an unscrupulous partner who defrauded their backers, amscrayed with the money and left Campbell to take the fall ... and do some time. Bruce, recently given six months to live following (it transpires) something of a misdiagnosis, decides Campbell's Kingdom is a nice isolated spot to end his days.

He hasn't reckoned with crooked contractor Owen Morgan (Stanley Baker) who is cutting corners and using cheap materials in the building of a dam which will eventually flood Campbell's land. Prevented from even visiting the Kingdom (the only way to the high ground it occupies is a clanking industrial hoist which Morgan owns and controls), Bruce bristles at Morgan's assertion that the land is worth nothing and is suspicious of the geologist's report Morgan produces which indicates there was no oil. Refusing to sell Morgan the land, Bruce makes contact with the geologist, Bladon (Michael Craig), and discovers that Morgan falsified the report.

Never mind that he's pale, weary and at death's door, Bruce gets a new lease of life fending off Morgan's overtures (which graduate from fiscal imperatives to acts of sabotage) and determining to prove that his grandfather was right about oil under the Kingdom. To this end, he engages the services of roughneck driller MacDonald (a spendidly miscast but loving-every-minute James Robertson Justice) who in turn employs world-weary trucker Tim (an equally miscast Sid James) to head a convoy hauling his equipment from Calgary to the Kingdom. A five hour drive with the little matter of roadblocks and Morgan's hoist at the end of it.

What follows is the centrepiece of Thomas's proficient thriller: a contrived but decently executed quarter of an hour's worth of hairpin bends, vertiginous drops, rock falls and dynamited bridges as Campbell, Boyden and MacDonald strive to outwit Morgan and has vicious crew and get the convoy up to the Kingdom. Scenes of truck wheels spinning and failing to gain traction as chasms yawn beneath them homage Clouzot's 'Wages of Fear' (released three years earlier), while the mechanics of the hoist and its tense ascent of the unforgiving mountainside predate 'Where Eagles Dare' by more than a decade.

This and a couple of other set-pieces (a night attack on the Kingdom and the inevitable climax as the jerry-built dam bursts) tick the right boxes; Baker is rugged, menacing and properly hissable as the villain; the Rockies provide a dramatic backdrop (even if Ernest Steward's cinematography does tend to come on a bit like a tourist brochure); and at a tight 100 minutes it never outstays its welcome.

On the flipside, the presence of half of Thomas's usual stable of Rank Organisation bit-players is somewhat offputting - you know you're in Canada because of the mountains but it all seems a bit East End, dahnit? - and Bogarde resolutely fails to gel with Barbara Murray in the shoehorned-in romantic subplot. The ending's a bit of a cop-out, as well, but to be fair it's replicated more or less faithfully from the source material (the only false note in Innes's otherwise pacy and atmospheric novel). Thomas's worst sins, though, are his blithe rejection of the standard editing room modus operandi of actually having shots that match. I don't think I've ever seen more screamingly blatant day-for-night shots than in 'Campbell's Kingdom'. Day-for-night? More like bright-blue-sky-for-pitch-black. The high bright sun, indeed.

*The latter a belated, almost cameo-like, return to the role.

**No relation to the prominently-chinned actor.

Appointment in London

Glancing back at 2007's inaugural Dirk-fest, I see that in a somewhat tossed-off review I rubbished 'The Spanish Gardener' as "a nothing film".

Which it is. I make no retraction of that statement.

Where I have sinned in that long-ago article is my dismissal of Philip Leacock as "a journeyman director ... his only other film of note is the WWII melodrama 'Appointment in London'."

Reapproaching 'Appointment in London' for this year's Dirk-fest, I realise I may have been hasty in that description. I remembered 'Appointment in London' as melodramatic because of the romantic rivalry between brash American pilot Mac Baker (William Sylvester) and driven British Wing Commander Tim Mason (Bogarde) over Eve Canyon (Dinah Sheridan), a widowed naval intelligence officer. I remembered it as melodramatic for its red-herring "careless talk costs lives" subplot.

But there's more to 'Appointment in London'; more than its thuddingly clunky title suggests. Let's get that title out of the way before we go any further. The film is set mostly on a Bomber Command airbase (presumably in Lincolnshire: it's very flat) and the title refers to the invitation to Buckingham Palace received by Pilot Officer Pete Greeno (Bryan Forbes) - nicknamed "the Brat" for his casual, daring-do attitude - to collect the DSO and bar.

Quite the Mr Popular is Greeno. Only Mason isn't too happy about his habit of making post-mission phone calls - in code. Not wanting to believe that Greeno might be a turncoat, Mason browbeats the truth out of him: the calls are to "a girl", to let her know he's safe. Mason tears him off a strip, then dismisses him. On Greeno's next bombing run, before he can keep his appointment in London, his plane crash lands on his return and he's killed outright.

It's against the sobering effect that Greeno's death has on the airbase that Mason's obsession with completing yet another and another mission is contrasted. He's notched up 87 as the film opens and both his superior and the Medical Officer are urging him to quit. 30 missions was the standard for a tour of duty on Bomber Command, with airmen lucky if they survived a third of that number. Mason's total - and his determination to push it up to 90 - comes across as borderline suicidal.

His last few death-baiting flights play out against his burgeoning relationship with Eve, their romance further counterpointed by the arrival at the base - looking for closure - of Greeno's mystery "girl": actually his very homely wife Pamela (Anne Leon). It's with mixed feelings, then, that Mason undertakes that fateful 90th mission. A nasty accident before the plane has even left the ground suggests that the flight might be jinxed ...

Easy to see why I'd recalled 'Appointment in London' as a melodrama. It has all the elements. But Leacock clearly isn't interested in them. They're only there as an excuse for a plot. Leacock's agenda is the minutiae of life in Bomber Command: the men, the planes, the equipment, the cameraderie, the drawn out periods of waiting between bombing runs and the proximity of violent and fiery death during them. What he isn't interested in, despite the cheesier aspects of the script, are gung-ho heroics, tub-thumping jingoism or the target for Mason's 90th mission being a secret base of our-best-chance-to-shorten-the-war importance.

I may have missed it, but I don't think Leacock really bothers identifying what the target for said mission is. The point is, the pilots and master bombers and radio operators and tailgunners took the same risks, chanced their lives in what were colloquially known as "flying coffins", and often limped back home riddled with anti-aircraft fire or an engine gone and it didn't matter if they'd been sent out to destroy a factory, a munitions dump or a railway yard (never mind something as dramatic as, say, a heavy water plant) - it was in a night's work.

I'm no plane buff but the few comments 'Appointment in London' garners on IMDb are from guys who seem to know there stuff and the consensus of opinion is that Leacock employs the right planes and the right technical details in accurate locations and situations. Disregard the Mason/Baker/Eve triangle and some talky longueurs, and 'Appointment in London' proves a thoughtful, detailed and quietly engrossing film.

Darling

Promiscuity. Infidelity. Celebrity. Degeneracy. Sex 'n' snobbery. Orgies. Abortion. Kleptomania.

By rights, 'Darling' ought to be a full-throttle, rip-snorting (or coke-snorting) lurid delight, a guilty pleasure of the highest order. In the hands of Russ Meyer it could have been a trashy soft-core romp a la 'Beyond the Valley of the Dolls'. With Richard Lester at the helm, it might have been the bona fide document from the Swinging Sixties that actual director John Schlesinger so obviously wanted it to be.

'Darling' starts with Diana Scott (Julie Christie) recounting her life story to an interviewer. There she is as a little girl on a school outing. There she is as a little girl in the school play. There she is aged twenty and all grown up with it, sashaying through the great metropolis when up comes a production assistant on a current affairs show presented by Robert Gold (Dirk Bogarde). She contributes a few casual lines to an interview on social attitudes and the generation gap and next thing you know Diana and Robert are merrily swanning around together.


Trouble is, he's married. So's she. Oooooh, controversial. Robert comes off as the heel for leaving his wife and children (a shot of him, suitcase in each hand, trudging sheepishly away from the house pulls back through the living room window to reveal he's left an envelope on the mantlepiece addressed to the luckless Mrs Gold), while Diana does an effective character assassination on her ex in just a couple of lines of voiceover (he's a "nice boy" apparently, and "playing at" being married). I may have missed it, but I don't think the poor chap even gets the dubious courtesy of an envelope on the mantlepiece.

Diana and Robert set up home together, but Robert does inconsiderate things like typing up the scripts for his TV show and treating Diana sensitively, so she does what any self-respecting vacuous amoral chic chick would do: she hooks up with filthy rich advertising executive Miles Brand (Laurence Harvey)* who has no class but looks good when he takes his shirt off and has a flash apartment and a Mercedes sports car. Because these are the things that count.

Sorry, was I being facetious?

Outwardly 'Darling' is a serious, multi-layered film that deconstructs the archetypes of the Sixties as determinedly as the aforementioned Richard Lester celebrated them. Not the least of its achievements is suggesting that Diana's outwardly respectable and starchly middle class parents are the people who schooled her in the elegantly empty small talk and studied self-confidence that greases the wheels as she makes her way up in so-called society.

Schlesinger's satire finds its outlet in the panoply of supporting characters: the sleazy MP (a pre-'Porridge' Brian Wilde) who drools over Diana, the dissipated photographer who captures an image that wins her the first of many lucrative modelling and advertising contracts, the fast-buck producers who cast her in a B-movie potboiler, and Miles's bohemian friends in Paris who think nothing of making out in front of each other and playing truth or dare. Ooooooh, even more controversial. (This, incidentally, is the most awful moment in the film: Schlesinger trying to be all arty and European and stylishly debauched but concocting, instead, a scene so flatly unerotic and unintentionally hilarious it makes your average Robin Askwith tits 'n' milkmen flick look like 'Citizen Kane'.)

Schlesinger draws parallels between these various stratas of society. When Diana meets the MP it's at a fundraiser whose rich patrons are doing their bit for the poor (particularly the minorities). Schlesinger cuts from a fat white woman stuffing herself to three black youths done up in period garb as serving boys watching her resentfully. Later, when Diana meets the Paris set, their liberal credentials are established by the inclusion of a sexually active black man as one of their own.

The fashions, the cars and the yappy John Dankworth score root 'Darling' firmly in the Sixties (albeit a view of the Sixties filtered through the consciousness of a director critical of the rapidly changing social mores). So, embarrassingly, do the unreconstructed values. For all that the fundraiser scene makes a point about prejudice, hypocrisy and condescension, the overall treatment of foreign characters (British Africans and Italians come off the worst) is as dubious as the treatment of gays (stereotypical) and the treatment of women. Schlesinger and scripter Frederic Raphael's portrayal of Diana is borderline misogynistic. With a less appealing, less charismatic and less meltingly beautiful actress than Julie Christie - and without Dirk Bogarde lending real acting chops to the first third of the film - 'Darling' would have been scuppered.

Fortunately, though, Christie is iconic. She turns an underwritten cypher into a sometimes confused, sometimes provocative and ultimately tragic heroine. The final scenes, where the loneliness and the desperation close in, are compelling. It's her film in the final analysis, but Bogarde's in the first third. As the cerebral, sardonic, slightly rumpled Robert - a man who ruefully walks out on his family only to find his new life isn't what he wanted - Bogarde brings depth and gravitas to the proceedings. His is a slow-burn performance - he mostly underplays, giving Christie the limelight - culminating in his discovery of Diana's affair with Miles and their verbal showdown as they leave a private viewing at a swanky art gallery. Diana makes to hail a cab, but Robert stops her.

Robert: We're not taking a taxi.
Diana: Why not?
Robert: I don't take whores in taxis.
Diana: What do you mean?
Robert: That's what you are, isn't it? A little whore. Isn't it? You've been back from Paris two days already. If you don't want me to find out what you're doing, don't leave your ticket and passport lying about all over the place.
Diana: Robert, I knew you'd get the wrong end of the stick ...
Robert: Your idea of fidelity is not having more than one man in the bed at the same time. You're a whore, baby, just a whore. And I don't take whores in taxis.

By nature of its attack on superficiality, 'Darling' inhabits a shallow milieu. Correspondingly, as the film progresses and Diana moves towards what is simultaneously her apotheosis in social climbing and the final stage of her objectification by the male gaze, characters become little more than set-dressing; emotions drain to hollowness and a facade of bored civility prevails. In depicting the stagnant, 'Darling' stagnates. The break-up between Diana and Robert is the high point of the film, their argument played out as, still in evening dress, they take the escalators down into an Underground station, the other punters nondescript, shabby and vaguely embarrassed by these two elegant individuals letting rip at each other, Diana's accent slipping as she yawps at him like a fishwife. It's the first, and only, time that the social masks drop and something raw, passionate and all-too-human is revealed.

*He makes his money by selling products and his name's Brand. I'll bet they were up all night thinking of that one! (By the same token Gold is belatedly identified as the only man who was worth anything to Diana, so he's called Gold. Diana is an attention seeking blonde whose sole talent is saturating the media with her own image, and who ends up a princess by dint of a loveless marriage, so she's called --- ... oops, better not go there.)

King & Country

'King & Country' - the very title just the first of several bitter pills the viewer is forced to swallow - was the third of Dirk Bogarde's five collaborations with Joseph Losey. For me, it's second only to 'The Servant'. Powerful, unflinching and bludgeoningly grim, it's no surprise it did sod all at the box office. Forty-five years on, its impact is undiminished. This is partly because of Losey's low-key and brutally realistic portrayal of trench warfare, and partly because of a cluster of great performances. It says something that this is one of the rare titles on the Bogarde filmography that he doesn't steal from his co-stars, wittily and elegantly, every time he's onscreen.

Briefly, and with SPOILERS ALL OVER THE PLACE, 'King & Country' concerns the trial and execution (told you it was a spoiler fest!) of Private Hamp (Tom Courtenay), charged with desertion after he leaves his post and goes walking away from the British lines. He was, he explains, trying to walk home. Assigned to defend him, educated officer Captain Hargreaves (Bogarde) finds himself unexpectedly moved by the working class, simple-minded Hamp.

Convinced that Hamp - a volunteer (on account of his wife and mother pressuring him) who has been in the trenches a soul-destroying three years - acted while the balance of his mind was disturbed, and with sympathetic testimony from Hamp's superior Lieutenant Webb (Barry Foster), Hargreaves makes his case. But he's up against by-the-book prosecutor Captain Midgley (James Villiers) and a Colonel (Peter Copley) who's already made his mind up about Hamp. To make matters worse, Captain O'Sullivan (Leo McKern), the orderly Hargreaves hopes will corraborate the medical evidence, refuses to play ball, scorning the suggestion of nervous breakdown or mental illness and asserting that Hamp was basically yellow.

Bogarde's verbal duel with McKern in this scene is intense. Bogarde - at the height of his fame in the early 60s - was wilfully casting off the matinee idol image and engaging with progressively more challenging material. Gone the dashing heroism of 'Ill Met by Moonlight' and 'They Who Dare'; in its place a harried, world-weary characterisation that points the way towards the controversial roles of his later career - a shift already heralded by his slithery turn as Barrett in 'The Servant', made a year before 'King & Country'. McKern is also on top form, Foster does easily the best work of his career, and Courtenay disappears into his character so completely it's as if he were a chameleon.

'King & Country' opens with a series of extended close-ups of a war memorial - a huge, joyless sculpture of a soldier lying lifelessly on a plinth - and ends with an archive photo of a dead horse adrift in the shell-scarred mud of no-man's-land. Losey incorporates other archive photos at pertinent moments. When Hamp speaks of trying to walk home, Losey cuts to a picture of a featureless terraced house that could be on any street in any working class town anywhere in England, a woman sweeping up outside. The image is anonymous to the point of bland. Then the poster on the wall leaps out at you: 'WOMEN OF BRITAIN SAY GO!', a reminder like a slap in the face of the spousal and matriarchal motivation behind Hamp's enlistment.

Losey's black-and-white camerawork conjures life in the trenches as a symphony of mud. The incessant crump of shells - sometimes way off in the distance, sometimes dangerously close - is a constant. The rain is ceaseless. Shattered emplacements, fetid puddles and the agony of waiting. 'King & Country' is a war film without scenes of battle. The Germans are never shown. They don't need to be. The trenches themselves, the conditions in which men are forced to live (and die) - these are the enemy. What men become when war comes to define them, what they are reduced to by the stubbornness and arrogance of their leaders - these are the enemy. There are no Germans in 'King & Country'. They're not needed. The British are bastards enough.

Hamp's fellow tommies stage a mock trial with a rat standing in for him. Cruel? Definitely, but nothing compared to their behaviour on the eve of Hamp's date with the firing squad. They crowd into his cell, ply him with rotgut. Thoroughly drunk, he is barely aware of what is happening as they blindfold him and enact a mock execution. The whole thing degenerates into a grotesque approximation of blind-man's-bluff, Hamp - finally snapping - blundering around arms akimbo, yelling "Where are you, you bastards?" just as the padre enters. It's a horrible scene to watch and as damning an indictment of man's inhumanity to man and the pointlessness of war as anything in 'All Quiet on the Western Front' or 'Paths of Glory'.

Passing judgement on Hamp, the Colonel dictates his report for onward transmission to his superiors. He omits everything Hargreaves introduced into evidence, adding "Don't make any mention of mental illness. They don't need to know about that kind of thing at HQ." When Hamp is taken out to be shot, it is under the watchful gaze of O'Sullivan; his executioners are the men who made a mockery of his last night alive, and Webb is forced to give the order to fire. When the fusilade fails to kill him outright, it is left to Hargreaves to adminster the coup de grace.

Told you there were spoilers. Told you it was grim.

Introducing the Third Annual Dirk-Fest

I started this blog in November 2007. Less than a month after my inaugural post, two events coincided: I found myself laid up ill and my wife (then my girlfriend) took pity on me and bought me the 'Screen Icons' Dirk Bogarde box set to cheer me up. I was off work a week and watched all seven of the DVDs in the set in short order - and blogged about them just as rapidly.

Bogarde has long been my favourite actor. He had a waspish sense of the sardonic about him coupled with a sometimes camp sometimes brooding tendency to engage with the dark side of his characters, kind of like Oscar Wilde or Noel Coward crossed with Jack Nicholson or Harvey Keitel. His eight volumes of autobiography are like old friends to me, books I've returned to time after time, often revisiting a specific passage or turn of phrase (Bogarde on an American limo driver who deposits him with a patently insincere have a nice day: "I nearly thanked him"), even though it's been demonstrated by his biographer John Coldstream that wholesale swathes of poetic licence were woven into the fabric of his memoirs.

Speaking of Coldstream, his biography of Bogarde is one of the best examples of its kind, up there with Kevin Brownlow's book on David Lean or David Weddle's account of Sam Peckinpah's turbulent life and career. It was 'Ever, Dirk', edited by Coldstream from reams of Bogarde's correspondence that prompted The Second Annual Dirk-Fest in late 2008.

The films covered so far have been:

The First Annual Dirk-Fest (2nd - 12th December 2007)
The Blue Lamp
Hunted
The Sleeping Tiger
The Spanish Gardener
Victim
The Servant
Accident

The Second Annual Dirk-Fest (25th September - 26th October 2008)
The Night Porter
The Singer Not the Song
A Bridge Too Far
Death in Venice
These Foolish Things
Ill Met By Moonlight
The Damned

Welcome, then, to The Third Annual Dirk-Fest. We've got three very different war films, a despatch from the Swinging Sixties, an oddity that pretty much stands as Bogarde's only sci-fi movie (or social horror, depending on how you want to look at it), a spy spoof and an example of the clean-cut heart-throb type product that made Bogarde a matinee idol in his younger years.

Coming attractions / Sam, Dirk, Andrei and the Class of 1984

The Peckinpah poll closed earlier today with ‘Straw Dogs’ just beating ‘The Wild Bunch’ into first place with 14 votes (24%), while Pike Bishop and the Bunch take 13 votes (22%) and happily mow down an army of Mexican revolutionaries while they're at it.

The big surprise was ‘Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia’ in third place with 13%. For a long time, I was convinced I was in a minority for loving this movie: most people I talked to had never heard of it, others just plain didn’t like it. I remember a screening at Nottingham’s Broadway Cinema as part of their now-defunct "Shots in the Dark" festival, where half of the audience responded enthusiastically to Peckinpah’s dark-to-the-point-of-nihilistic humour while the other half sat there in stony silence.

In joint fourth place, ‘Ride the High Country’, ‘The Ballad of Cable Hogue’ and ‘Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid’ garnered 5 votes (8%) apiece. Out where the iron crosses grow, there were 3 votes (5%) for Bloody Sam's only war movie. ‘The Getaway’ made off with 2 votes (3%), while the elegiac ‘Junior Bonner’ and the less-than-elegiac ‘The Killer Elite’ and ‘The Osterman Weekend’ scraped 1 vote (1%) each.

There was no love at all for ‘The Deadly Companions’, ‘Major Dundee’ or ‘Convoy’.

And for a while I was quite impressed that the computer had worked out the percentages for me ... until I realised that the whole thing only adds up to 94%. I'm going to assume the missing 6% is in honour of his acclaimed TV movie ‘Noon Wine’ and move swiftly on.

The Peckinpah tribute gets underway on 1st December with the whole month dedicated to the maverick maestro here on The Agitation of the Mind. Feel free to join in. Swipe one of these banners, share your thoughts on all things Peckinpah and let’s mark the 25th anniversary of his passing on 28th December in fine style.

In the meantime - and celebrating a personality about as different to Sam Peckinpah as you can get - October kicks off with the Third Annual Dirk-Fest. Mid month, the Tarkovsky retrospective considers two very different works by the chuckle-free Russian director, while Sergio Leone takes centre stage on 26th October when I’ll be writing about ‘Once Upon a Time in America’ as part of This Distracted Globe’s "Class of 1984" blog-a-thon.

M.I.A.: the late period Dirk Bogarde

Jeremy has devoted February at Moon in the Gutter to twenty-eight films missing in action on DVD. He has already unearthed a cornucopia of curios and classics, all of them criminally overlooked.

I’d like to weigh in with four titles – one because it’s been at least fifteen years since I’ve seen it – and the others because I’ve never seen them and would welcome the opportunity. They represent four consecutive appearances in Dirk Bogarde’s filmography, the last proving of such great personal frustration to him following the director’s re-editing of the Bogarde-approved original cut (“he fucked up my performance and he fucked up the film”, as the great man unequivocally put it during a TV interview in the ’90s) that he withdrew from film-making for over a decade and would only return to the big screen once more, in 1991 for Bertrand Tavernier’s ‘These Foolish Things’.

If for no other reason than selfishness – it would greatly aid me in putting together the Third Annual Dirk-Fest later this year – here’s a big plea to whichever distribution companies have the rights to them for the following titles on DVD:


The Serpent (1974) – I’d love to see this purely because of its eclectic cast: Bogarde, Yul Brynner, Henry Fonda, Philippe Noiret and Virni Lisi. Apparently it’s something of a Euro-pudding, with locations (and languages) flitting between the UK, Germany and France. Bogarde, in a letter to Penelope Mortimer, describes the part as necessitating “very little except stand[ing] about in a black raincoat looking enigmatic”. Ah, but no-one did enigmatic like Dirk Bogarde … and surely the film’s worth it for that alone.

Permission to Kill (1975) – more spy shenanigans. Bogarde described this one, in another letter to regular correspondent Penelope Mortimer, as “a nice simple CIA-chase-round-the-airport” sort of movie, adding that his fee would foot the bill for a new terrace at Clermont, his home in France. Again, the film allays Bogarde with some interesting co-stars: Ava Gardner, Frederic Forrest and Timothy Dalton.

Providence (1978) – Alain Resnais’s darkly comic tale of a dying novelist and his dysfunctional family is a brilliant, multi-faceted meditation of life, death, art, memory and the blurred lines between fiction and reality. Bogarde co-stars with John Gielgud, Ellen Burstyn and David Warner. This is high-profile stuff and with the long-unavailable Tartan VHS release changing hands for upwards of £20 a copy, it’s long past due for the DVD treatment.

Despair (1978) – if ‘The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’, the movie that well fucked Sean Connery off with film-making, can be readily acquired on small shiny disc, then why can’t we get a chance to make our own minds up about the production that was almost Sir Dirk’s final hour. With box-sets of director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s earlier work on the market, surely ‘Despair’ – from a script by acclaimed playwright Tom Stoppard (loosely adapting a novel by Nabakov) and Bogarde in the lead role – has an audience of genuine movie-lovers eagerly awaiting its release?

The Damned

On the night of 30th June 1934, Nazi troops moved against Ernst Rohm’s paramilitary SA (Sturmabteilung) in a putsch that lasted three days and saw over 85 deaths. Hitler’s antagonism against the SA owed to their continued independence; the putsch was also an excuse for striking at his critics, demonstrating the force and deadly efficiency of his own SS troups, and consolidating his power base.

The carefully orchestrated coup was called Operation Hummingbird, but has gone down in history as the Night of the Long Knives.

This nefarious moment in German history provides the 20-minute centrepiece to Luchino Visconti’s ‘The Damned’. Subtitled ‘Götterdämmerung’ (trans. “twilight of the gods”), the Wagnerian reference is apposite. Visconti’s film is operatic to the point of being overwrought, particularly in its increasingly melodramatic last half hour.

The stage upon which this opera of Nazi-ism, power struggles, sexual ambiguities and compromised morality plays out is the Essenbeck Steelworks, owned by a powerful industrial family whose political allegiance is important to Machiavellian SS officer Aschenbach (Helmut Griem). ‘The Damned’ opens with a birthday party for the ageing Baron von Essenbeck who announces his retirement, leading to instantly fractured interrelationships inside and outside of the family as the appointment of the new director of the company hangs in the balance.

The rank outsider* in all of this is Frederick Bruckmann (Dirk Bogarde); however, he has two aces up his sleeve: his relationship with the Baron’s widowed daughter, Sophie (Ingrid Thulin), and the backing of Aschenbach.

Through Aschenbach’s machinations and Sophie’s borderline erotic manipulation of her sexually confused son Martin (Helmut Berger) – whose predilections range from cross-dressing to paedophilia to mother-fixation – Bruckmann is appointed director of the steelworks. But it’s not long before his obsession with complete control over both firm and family – not to mention his reluctance to take the political hard line that his deal with the devil (or rather his suave earthly representative Aschenbach) requires – leads to his downfall.

Bogarde excels as Bruckmann: a vivid, complex study of ambition, fear, moral cowardice, desperation and, finally, abject defeat. Ingrid Thulin goes a wee bit ‘Lady Macbeth’ towards the end, but by this point Visconti’s shovelling on the theatrics like there’s tomorrow. Helmut Berger, Visconti’s homo-erotic camera clearly favouring him over the rest of the cast, gives a memorable performance if sometimes for the wrong reasons; but there’s no doubt that he gets across Martin’s vicious amorality.

Further down the cast list, Umberto Orsini and Charlotte Rampling deliver compelling turns.

But it’s Helmut Griem who eclipses even Bogarde. “That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain,” to quote ‘Hamlet’. Aschenbach smiles, and smiles, and soothes, and coerces and chills. Martin’s demonic ascension and engineering of Bruckmann and Sophie’s fate is nothing but the movement of Aschenbach pulling the strings. Griem plays him with infinite charm and assured understatement. Amidst the emotional excesses of Visconti’s lurid epic, he’s the calm centre of stillness, composure and complete ruthlessness.



*Readers of Sheridan Morley’s book on Dirk Bogarde’s early career will, I hope, forgive the pun.

Ill Met by Moonlight

By 1957, Powell and Pressburger were moving towards the annulment of their partnership. It had been an almost decade-long decline.

‘Gone to Earth’ was a slab of melodrama, ‘The Elusive Pimpernel’ a bit of pantomime camp, ‘The Tales of Hoffmann’ a failed attempt to recapture the magnificence of ‘The Red Shoes’, and ‘O … Rosalinda!!’ a self-indulgent flop, audiences showing either a singular lack of interest in operetta or an understandable caution in approaching films with three exclamation marks in the title.

Their last two outings were a return to the war movies that had made their name; but whereas the eight-film run of classics between ‘The Spy in Black’ in 1939 and the ‘A
Matter of Life and Death’ in 1946 were made during the war years (the latter in production just as the war was reaching its conclusion), ‘The Battle of the River Plate’ and ‘Ill Met By Moonlight’ came ten years afterwards: would that curious alchemy which made art of the propaganda film still function in retrospect?

Well, not with ‘The Battle of the River Plate’. Although a decent enough account overall of the sinking of the Graf Spree, Powell’s decision to film the movements of ships at sea resulted a highly cinematic footage utterly at odds with the patently studio-bound falsity of the rest of the film.

Which leaves us with ‘Ill Met By Moonlight’, their swansong, its box-office swelled by Dirk Bogarde in his dishy, matinee-idol prime, and again another account of an actual incident from the war.

The source material was a book by W. Stanley Moss recounting the exploits in Crete of Major (now Sir) Patrick Leigh-Fermor, an authentically individualistic English hero (as T.E. Lawrence to the desert, so Leigh-Fermor to the Mediterranean), and his successful kidnap of a high ranking German officer.

Powell and Pressburger’s take on Leigh-Fermor is romanticism writ large. Bogarde’s swooning performance is entirely in keeping with the sense of hero-worship with which Powell saturates the film. P&P favourite Marius Goring essays the German general with distinctly more gravitas.

And herein lies the enigma (and pleasure) of the film. Goring’s career office is a professional, but courteous with it: a Nazi and a gentleman. (P&P had been daring enough to portray ‘good’ Germans even in the war years: the harmless Vogel (Niall MacGinnis) in ‘49th Parallel’ and the dignified Kretschmar-Schuldorff (Anton Walbrook) in ‘The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp’.) Leigh-Fermor, however, is portrayed as a gentleman amateur. Ian Christie, in his wonderful study of Powell and Pressburger’s films, ‘Arrows of Desire’, describes Bogarde/Leigh-Fermor as “dressed as a comic-opera bandit when we first see him”. He goes on:

“… the whole story is framed, not only by its Shakespearean title but by a reference to the Odyssey … If the [film’s] realization does not live up to its promise or ambition, it remains nonetheless an intriguing stage in the military ideology that runs from Blimp … a defiant assertion of the gentleman-amateur ideal at a time when Britain was learning its new role in the world of superpower conflict and the end of Empire” (‘Arrows of Desire’, Faber & Faber, p.78).

Which is absolutely spot-on. Everything from Bogarde’s dashing leading man status to Goring’s good grace in defeat to the studied poignancy of the ending (the German officer tries to ‘buy’ the affections of a local Cretan child, with a view to leaving clues to his whereabouts, only for the lad – his loyalties hitherto in doubt – to be revealed as unswayable in his devotion to Leigh-Fermor). Which only makes the film’s far-and-away best scene that much more effective in its swift, no-nonsense efficiency.

Leigh-Fermor visits his contact, a dentist, in a Nazi-held town. Unbeknownst to him, he is followed. When the Nazi patrol (its sergeant a young Christopher Lee, speaking German like a native) burst in, Leigh-Fermor finds himself hustled into the dentist’s chair, a white bib-like cloth draped around his neck. Terrified of dentists, L-F plays along, not batting an eyelid when the patrol come stomping in, but losing his cool as soon as the dentist, hands shaking from fear, starts up the drill. The Nazi sergeant has his suspicions and pulls the cloth from his neck; L-F is clutching a pistol under it. He summarily executes the German soldiers. There’s nothing do-or-die or remotely heroic about the scene; he does it because he’s scared of dentists.

Seven years after ‘The Blue Lamp’ and just five after ‘Hunted’, and a full decade or more before the darker characterisations of ‘The Damned’ and ‘The Night Porter’, the anti-romantic-hero element of Bogarde’s cinematic persona is revealed in a brief lightning flash. So too the adaptability and menacing screen presence of Christopher Lee. And between them, a scene effective enough to transform what could have been Powell and Pressburger’s death rattle into a respectable send-off.

These Foolish Things

Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s ‘Despair’ (1978) was almost Dirk Bogarde’s last film, an experience that soured his already sceptical feelings about film-making. Fassbinder re-edited the film drastically, despite his star’s preference of the original cut. “He fucked up my performance” was Bogarde's blunt assessment during the BBC interview ‘By Myself’ which aired shortly after he received his knighthood in 1992.

He withdrew to Clermont, his house in France (referred to in the autobiographies as Le Pigeonnier) and concentrated his efforts on his writing, only taking the occasional bit of television work out of financial necessity. Directors continued to offer him scripts; Bogarde inevitably politely declined.

Fortunately for cineastes, Bertrand Tavernier tempted him out of retirement in 1990, a full twelve years since he had last appeared before a movie camera, with the lead role in the intimate family drama ‘These Foolish Things’ (or ‘Daddy Nostalgie’ to use the indigenous title).

‘These Foolish Things’ is the better title. ‘Daddy Nostalgie’ hints at a certain sentimentality. Nothing could be further from Tavernier’s aesthetic. There is not a trace of false emotion here.
Tony* (Bogarde) is a well-travelled Englishman living out his retirement in seaside villa in France which he shares with his humourless and emotionally inexpressive French wife Miche (Odette Laure). Following an operation, Tony finds himself almost housebound. As he supposed recuperation progresses, it becomes apparent that the surgery might not have been successful.
The couple’s all-but-estranged daughter Caroline (Jane Birkin) returns to the villa to stay with them and help nurse her ailing father. For the first time in their respective lives, father and daughter get to know each other. The poignancy of their relationship has its counterpoint in Tony and Miche’s fractious marriage.

With its deceptively slight narrative and numerous scenes of marital disharmony, ‘These Foolish Things’ could easily have been tedious, talky and decidedly uncinematic. Three things redeem it: the beautiful widescreen cinematography, effortlessly establishing location and mood; Tavernier’s intelligent handling of a fine, literate screenplay by Colo Tavernier O’Hagan; and Dirk Bogarde, giving his finest performance since ‘Death in Venice’. Waspish, sarcastic and yet, at heart, utterly vulnerable, Bogarde’s characterisation of Tony is multi-layered and completely real.

‘These Foolish Things’ is about a man in the twilight of his years. It is illuminated by one of Bogarde’s most desperately moving performances (kudos to Laure and Birkin, too; the film is, after all, a chamber piece) and stands as a fitting swansong to a great actor.

*And how bittersweet must it have been for Bogarde to play a character with the same first name as his then-deceased partner of fifty years, Anthony Forwood?

PERSONAL FAVES: Death in Venice

Thomas Mann’s ‘Death in Venice’ had already been adapted, operatically, by Benjamin Britten before Luchino Visconti came to film it in 1971. Both Britten and Visconti were gay, which perhaps accounts for the common misconception that the film is about an old man’s obsessive lust for a boy barely in his teens.

Wrong. The film, like its literary source, is about many things, not least the nature of art and beauty and the thorny question of where, between the two, the humanity of the artist resides. There is nothing perverse or cynical about the film. For all of its melancholy it is, in fact, one of the most beautiful works of film art in the history of the medium.

Mann’s novella was inspired by the author’s encounter with Gustav Mahler during a train journey. Shocked at Mahler’s physical appearance (the haggard Aschenbach at the end of the story, powdered, a line of mascara running down his face, is Mann’s fictive approximation). And it was for the purposes of fiction that the character became Gustav von Aschenbach, a writer of books, not of music.

A director whose forte was his immaculate attention to detail, particularly in the observation of social rituals (the minutiae of Mann’s descriptions are captured in vivid and poetic images), Visconti’s film is a faithful adaptation but for one crucial alteration.

The director’s most decisive aesthetic decision was to allay the character more closely with the man who inspired him. Thus the Aschenbach of the film is a composer - moreover, by dint of the soundtrack, Aschenbach is Mahler. Evocative use is made of his Third and Fifth Symphonies, particularly the latter’s adagietto. (Even Karajan, a non-Mahlerian, was taken by the film enough to record the Fifth with the Berlin Philharmonic.)

Visconti also adds a series of flashbacks which concern, variously, Aschenbach’s attitude to his art, the death of his beloved infant daughter (viewed in this light, the effeminate young boy Tadzio [Bjorn Andresen], of an age Aschenbach’s daughter would have been, becomes almost a replacement for the composer’s fatherly devotion), and his debasement in the boudoir of a hooker - this last being the event that instils in him an obsession with cerebral and artistic purity and dignity.

A key flashback sees him in heated debate with Alfred (Mark Burns), a fellow composer:

Aschenbach: The creation of beauty and purity is a spiritual act.

Alfried: No, Gustav. Beauty belongs to the senses, only to the senses.

Aschenbach: You cannot reach the spirit from the senses. It’s only through complete domination of the senses that you can achieve wisdom, truth and purity.

At the risk of oversimplifying a deep, profound and thought-provoking film, ‘Death in Venice’ is about an artist who, suffering from nervous exhaustion, takes a supposedly recuperative sojourn only to be confronted with a vision of purity and beauty, but one that, by definition of his reaction to it, completely invalidates the principles by which he has tried to live.

The last half hour is shattering. Scenes dealing with Aschenbach’s increasing bad health, played out against a plague-ridden Venice stained with disinfectant and ravaged by fires, bookend the final flashback sequence, which demonstrates Aschenbach’s failure as an artist and public vilification.

Throughout, Dirk Bogarde’s performance as Aschenbach has been perfectly nuanced and intricately mannered, suggesting through the minimum of dialogue (he is onscreen the whole time, but entire stretches of the film pass without him uttering a word) the brittleness and emotional void of a man who has kept his humanity tightly under wraps. The last quarter of the film, however, is acting on another level. Bogarde progressively tears away layer after layer of his character, culminating in a moment of heart-breaking acceptance as Aschenbach finally attempts to reach out to someone only for it to be too late. He slumps back into his deckchair; the man and the artist are dead. It is arguably one of the most moving death scenes that any actor has played.

For Bogarde, Aschenbach was more than just a role:

The five months of work on ‘Death in Venice’ had been the hardest I had ever known for stress and mental strain; daily I had struggled with a personality … who had overwhelmed me to such an extent that every single function I performed in my daily life was as he would have done. I was never without his influence at any time, even in sleep. - Dirk Bogarde, ‘An Orderly Man’, chapter 1.

A Bridge Too Far

It's easy to see how Richard Attenborough's 'A Bridge Too Far', based on Cornelius Ryan's exhaustive account of Arnhem debacle Operation Market-Garden, was intended as a corrective to the big-budget, all-star-cast jingoist war epics so popular in the 60s and 70s.

For all intents and purposes, it takes its cue from the likes of 'The Longest Day' - epic running time (just shy of three hours); huge, intricately-orchestrated set-pieces; famous faces all over the shop (Sean Connery, Gene Hackman, Michael Caine, James Caan, Sir Laurence Olivier ... the list would be longer than the article itself if I listed everyone); an almost inappropriately stirring score by John Addison. In fact, it differs in only one crucial way.

It's about a fuck-up.

An Allied fuck-up.

This aspect of 'A Bridge Too Far' was never going to be its most popular attribute. And yet, when it was released, the almost inevitable storm of controversy that greeted it centred almost solely around Dirk Bogarde.

Here's Christian Browning, son of General Sir Frederick Browning (the real-life character Bogarde played) on his performance: "... poncing around with white gloves. Those gloves! Dirk played Anacleto in 'The Singer Not the Song' more or less the way he played Dad." (Quoted in John Coldstream's biography.) Here's co-star Edward Fox (quoted in same): "He was impersonating Freddie Browning completely wrongly. It was as if he set out to play him as a poofy waiter."

(The very idea of Edward Fox, whose okay-chaps-what-ho performance isn't far short of parody, criticising a Bogarde characterisation as 'poofy' is hilariously ludicrous.)

So why all the Dirk bashing?

The answer goes back to one of the two reasons Bogarde accepted the role (three if you count the fact that Attenborough, by dint of a holiday home in Provence, was more or less Bogarde's neighbour): (i) a $100,000 salary, and (ii) Bogarde was first billed and his character has 'the Line'.

Discarding the former (okay, $100K is decent chunk now and was a fuckload back in 1977, but it was still peanuts compared to what the American cast members earned), Bogarde's ego was certainly stroked by the latter. Because so many big stars were cast, billing was alphabetical: therefore, before Caan, Caine and Connery, let alone the likes of Elliott Gould or Ryan O'Neal, Dirk Bogarde stands as top-billed actor.

Then there's the Line. Again, a note of explanation: Browning was under considerable pressure from High Command (specifically Montgomery) to deliver an against-the-odds success with Operation Market-Garden. Concerned over the logistics, dubious about taking Arnhem, Browning famously averred that they'd be going "a bridge too far". It's worth bearing in mind that he said this before the operation.

William Goldman's script - in all other respects a clear-sighted adaptation of Ryan's book - indulges in a jarring anachronism. Because Goldman opted to omit the critical meeting between Montgomery and Browning, Browning is essentially cast as the villain of the piece: monomanicially pushing the mission through despite everyone else's misgivings, fixated in true death-or-glory stylee that Market-Garden is infallible. Worse, in order to retain the line that gives both book and film their title, he has Browning foppishly muse, after the operation goes disastrously wrong, "Well, as you know, I've always thought that we tried to go a bridge too far". Which basically makes Browning sound like a pompous dick, blithely stating the obvious after the fact.

The script, however, is the writer's business; in this case an American scribe's take on a British snafu. That a British director happily filmed it is a matter for discussion elsewhere.

As regards Bogarde's involvement .... call me biased (I'm a fan, after all), but wasn't he merely doing what all actors do - reading the lines and taking direction?

And his performance? He plays Browning as aloof, slightly disconnected (attributes I'd imagine are necessary for a high-ranking officer in wartime, who makes decisions, and by extension gambles with lives, coolly and dispassionately). In a film where so many of the other stars just be themselves (Connery is Connery, Caine is Caine) or ham it up (Hackman as a Polish officer) or phone in wooden performances (O'Neal) or play on their established persona (Maximilian Schell and Hardy Kruger reprise their rent-a-Kraut roles from any number of previous outings), Bogarde's performance is definitely not the worst. Far from it. In fact, perhaps only Anthony Hopkins emerges from the whole production as giving a rounded, subtle, memorable performance.

'A Bridge Too Far' has some stunningly brilliant scenes and a fair smattering of shruggingly ordinary ones. Attenborough's direction is often geared to spectacle when human drama needs to be at the fore (I'd love Peckinpah to have made this film, to have given it the sense of waste, loss, brutality, desperation and hard-won, shell-shocked humanity that permeates every frame of 'Cross of Iron'). Peckinpah had been a Marine. Dirk Bogarde, too, had a military background. He served in World War II. His evocative poem 'Steel Cathedrals' is still frequently anthologised in collections of war poetry.

I wonder how many other actors in 'A Bridge Too Far' had also worn the uniform for real, not just as a costume.

The Singer Not the Song

In his biography of Dirk Bogarde, John Coldstream infers that the actor’s disinterest in ‘The Singer Not the Song’, his last outing for the Rank Organisation, led to his deliberately camp performance, a factor crucial to the film’s failure.

Although Bogarde was at the height of his fame when it was released in 1961, audiences clearly preferred him as the lovable Dr Simon Sparrow, or as dashing war heroes in the likes of ‘Ill Met by Moonlight’ or ‘They Who Dare’.

Bogarde was given his choice of the two main roles in ‘The Singer Not the Song’, indicative of Rank's fears of losing him. Bogarde was already tired of the formulaic fare on offer, and ill-feeling between him and Rank supremo Earl St John had been in the wind for a while. Nonetheless, he was one of their biggest stars, and had already been lured to Hollywood for the Franz Liszt biopic ‘Song Without End’.

So Bogarde, swayed no doubt by a significant paycheque (Rank threw a serious budget at the production), took the role of Anacleto, the Mexican bandit chief who enters into a love-hate relationship with an unorthodox priest. Title as metaphor, geddit? The singer not the song = the priest not the religion.

Clad in black (most notably in the extremely tight-fitting leather trouser department), sneer fixed in place, eyebrow perpetually arched, a white cat on his knee in several scenes - this four years before the first onscreen appearance of Blofeld in ‘Thunderball’! - there can be no doubt that this was miscasting writ large. It says something, then, that Bogarde is easily the best thing about the film.

Equally miscast is John Mills at his most avuncular as Father Keogh, the priest who stands up to Anacleto. The script calls for a dynamic - almost an attraction - between the antagonists. Clearly, a much younger, more energetic actor should have been cast instead of Mills.

Of Mylene Demongeot, the European starlet who plays the girl caught between them (a role which should provide the film’s human centre), the kindest that can be said is that she was no actress.

Another misjudgement was retaining Nigel Balchin as scriptwriter. A writer at the forefront of twentieth century British realism (his best known work, ‘The Small Back Room’, was filmed by Powell and Pressburger in 1948), he was simply the wrong man to adapt Audrey Erskine-Lindrop’s melodramatic novel. Also, the geniuses at Rank saw fit to put the whole thing in the hands of Roy Ward Baker, director of ‘The One That Got Away’ and ‘A Night to Remember’, films which demonstrate attention to detail and emotional distance from otherwise thorny subject matter (a German POW’s successful escape bid in the former; the sinking of the ‘Titanic’ in the latter) - again, obviously the wrong man for the job.

In ‘Snakes and Ladders’ - his only autobiographical volume that deals in any detail with his Rank years - Bogarde includes a publicity still from ‘The Singer Not the Song’, but doesn’t mention the film by name anywhere in the text. No reason for him to; audiences stayed away in droves. Baker took the brunt: his career deflated; it was six years before he directed again, and even then he was reduced to trashy Hammer horror quickies.

Curiously - perversely, even - ‘The Singer Not the Song’ began to find its champions. Particularly in France, where it swiftly became a cult hit. Today it exists as a cinephile’s guilty pleasure, one that’s all the more enjoyable for knowing that Bogarde was in on the joke.